'Long Island Medium': Pandemic has 'really opened our eyes'

Hicksville mentalist Theresa Caputo, star of the TLC reality show "Long Island Medium," says the COVID-19 pandemic has made the public more cognizant of life's fleeting nature.

"Nothing in life, as we've witnessed over the past several months, is a guarantee," Caputo, who is 53 or 54 according to differing sources, told People magazine in an interview posted Wednesday to promote her upcoming fourth book, "Good Mourning: Moving Through Everyday Losses With Wisdom From the Other Side." "This pandemic has really opened our eyes to a lot of things. So it's really just recognizing that losses are part of our everyday life," and that we must choose "how we handle these losses or don't handle them. And if we can recognize them, we'll know what to do and recover much faster."

While the new book is "about daily losses," she said, it is also about "what once was," before the pandemic. "We're still home and people have lost their independence. They've lost control. They've lost safety, familiarity. They've lost financial stability. They might've even lost their hopes and dreams. And their identity."

Because of hospital and funerary limitations on crowds and other indoor contact to prevent spread of disease, those who have suffered death in their family often are unable, she said, "to be there for their loved ones. … We were thrown into a situation where even the ill, we weren't able to be with them. We weren't able to be by their sides to say goodbye to them. And that I think is something that a lot of people are going to struggle with."

She also responded to a question about skeptics of anyone claiming to be able to contact the dead, such as Long Island-native illusionist Criss Angel who in a 2013 Newsday interview offered Caputo a million dollars if she could prove such abilities. "Whether you understand or believe or you're skeptical, we have daily losses," Caputo said. "Navigating our time here in the physical world, coping with someone's passing, it's so profound."

"Good Mourning," from the HarperCollins imprint HarperOne, is due out Oct. 6.